Undersized Urbanite Landscaping — Part 1

As I wrote the title, I thought, I no longer want to refer to this house as the undersized urbanite house. I want it to have its own name and be “_____ for the undersized urbanite”, you know what I mean? This house needs a name….we’ll figure that out soon.

Today I’m here to share with you the fun landscaping and gardening I got up to last night. After that haul from MBS it would’ve been hard not to jump right in! 🙂 I started with the trees since they will need to be down before the grass. The kits had two identical shaped plastic trees, which are 7.5″ tall.

The kit said that the trees could easily be cut down, so I decided to trim one, that way I have two different sized and shaped trees.

You can hardly tell from the picture, but I did cut one. I started to cut the other and then panicked I might ruin it or end up with two exact same trees again, but shorter, lol, so I stopped myself. I then followed guidance from the box to add little dabs of glue to the branches,

Then I sprinkled on some foliage;

I continued on that way, which took a lot of time. By the time I got to the next tree, I realized that dabbing the glue was inefficient. As I dabbed the glue, the foliage on the opposite branch would fall off, either becaus elf shaking or my finger/knuckle braising it. To make my life easier, I decided to do a light spread of glue over the entire tree, and then add the foliage.

This worked a lot better, because even if something fell off, it would at least land on glue on the other branches, saving me time. The second tree took me about 5 minutes., the first, almost 20.

Tonight I’m going to add more foliage to “beef up” the trees. I had to wait until the glue dried before I touched them more. The foliage was, and still is, (because yes I did just go see them and touch them this morning, lol), falling off. Here they are resting against the house, the white is the wet glue, I was not waiting that long to share with you!

I’m not sure about those cone trees;

They are very topiary like, which I obviously saw in the store, so I don’t know why I brought them home. I wanted evergreen or pine trees. They did have some but I’m pretty sure they were $14 for two, so I figured I’d see what I could do with those first? I might cut them down to use for bushes, they need a lot of work. The foliage is falling off like crazy, and soon they will just be a pair of squeeze’em bushes, lol.

The trees were not enough for one night, so I put down some garden dirt, I used English Breakfast Tea

After placing the dirt, I started googling images of gardens to find inspiration on how to “trim” it off. A lot had stone, or nothing. I thought stone would be too much, since there is already so much stone. Nothing wouldn’t work because I don’t have the patience to make those perfect little ditches…

Then I glanced over at my supposedly useless wrong sized hedge…and thought that might make a good trim. It was too tall (1/4″ which is 1′ or 12 inches in real life, too tall!), so I cut it down the middle.

Then I lined the garden with glue and stuck it down. Simple.

I love how it looks. I considered going around the path and driveway too, but it might be too much…

I think I’d rather have something else here…maybe even a fencing of some sort. Or one of those small iron fences? I really want an evergreen tree for here by the driveway and path…

Wouldn’t it look so perfect? I think so. But that topiary one is just no good….

I played around with flower foam that I bought at the dollar store;

I have lots of colours!

I was happy to get these bags for only $1, which seemed like an even better score after being at MBs and paying $3.50 for the bags of grass/ foliage. Also at MBS they had a ziploc bag similar in size to the one I put my scraps in….

For .75 cents!! Crazy! And you really only need the tiniest pinch…so I have flowers for life! This is actually floral foam, Oasis foam, which you use to put artificial flower arrangements in. I’m not sure if its the same as the flower flocking available at MBS, but it does the trick for me! Using floral wire, and the scraps from the trees, I made some bushes and flowers. Nothing specific, just dipped in glue then in foam. I’m a really simple person, lol.

Here they are resting in the garden;

I also experimented with some tissue paper and made some roses;

This was before I had the floral wire out. This was just regular green craft wire. I won’t use them in the garden because they won’t match the rest, so I shoved them into a vase. But this vase is out of scale. It would be almost 2 feet tall in real life! I will save this for a future 1/2″ scale build 😉

Tonight I’m going back to work on the trees. Once they go in, the grass can be put in. I will make some more flowers too. Experiment with some flower punches and see what tutorials I can find. I prefer the tissue paper flowers to the flocking because they are more realistic. Most of the landscaping I see in quarter scale is the flocking, but that’s probably because he tissue paper is time consuming! But no doubt worth it! 🙂

I will be back soon! Have a happy hump day! [Aka Wednesday, middle of the week, the hump. For those who need clarification :)]

4 comments

Doesn’t landscaping make a difference? I love the way it adds to the realism and gives character to the houses like nothing else does. I’m like you too – I much prefer flowers with detail to just the flocking. Though I do do it the easy way and use kits for mine. Expensive though! Your trees have come out really well – I had the same trouble with the foliage sticking on my autumn tree for The Avalon, and the foliage (and extra branches I added) still drops off easily. I’ve sprayed it with hairspray but will have to tackle it again.

Hi Beck….I’ve been enjoying all your blogs (even though I’ve been too lazy to make comments) and am amazed at all your handiwork. It’s a great hobby…or maybe I should call it a great passion! If you still want a “vote” about the couch, mine would be to leave it without upholstery on the back. It looks good both ways, but I think it visually reduces its’ size w/o the back upholstery as it appears to take up less space in the room…possibly more of an optical illusion. I don’t know where you find the energy and the patience to work with such tiny pieces, after each long, busy day with the kidlets.

We’ve also been enjoying all the pictures you put on Facebook. Makaio has turned into a fun and funky little character, and we love how his happy (mischievous?) smile lights up his whole face. You & Gord are obviously doing a great job with the kids. Congrats!

I sent a text message earlier this week and just remembered that you are still w/o a phone, so won’t have received it. I just told you that I was thinking about you because my kitchen smelled so good because I was making a batch of your Christmas cookies. I quipped that the only problem was that you hadn’t included directions for keeping Gramps out of them. He appeared, as if by magic, the minute the first tray came out of the oven!! That was a great Christmas gift, very creative of you, and made cookie making easy and fun for me. I make the ones with oatmeal, and still have the other jar to make. They got set aside when we went to Mexico for 6 weeks, then we were just home for 3 very busy weeks before heading to Southern California. Needless to say, we’re home now and beginning to get our lives back in some sort of order again, so it was finally “cookie baking time”.